Hacker News Reader

Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

I expect continued economic performance from a guy who went from nothing to... $25B was the latest number I heard.

Empirically, I don't think Christians do worse investments than us atheists, so rationally speaking I don't think it's much of a factor.

View on HN

> I expect continued economic performance from a guy who went from nothing to... $25B

I would expect a return to the mean

But why? He seems to know the right people, and is, uhm, ruthless - nothing changed.

I'll admit that im not all that familiar with his business dealings, but from what i understand most of his fortune comes from paypal, facebook and plantir. That's three high risk investments that really paid off. Impressive but at the end of the day, luck probably paid a big part as its a small number of very high yield investments. Over time i would expect his luck to balance out. I'm not saying he's going to lose all his money, but i'd expect it to grow at a more normal rate over the long term. I think its unlikely he will continue striking it rich in such a dramatic fashion over the long term.

Crunchbase lists a few hundred of his investments: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/peter-thiel

He's also written several books. "Zero to One" is very influential: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Peter-Thiel/author/B00J0W47NA

He's been making big bucks for 30 years. That is his mean.

> Empirically, I don't think Christians do worse investments than us atheists, so rationally speaking I don't think it's much of a factor.

Hm, why not? Like obviously it would be hard to do a study because you can't just control by wealth. But if you control by the level of education and stop at that I'm almost certain christians would lose.

How can you tell he’s a Christian? I only know him by his works.

> How can you tell he’s a Christian?

Thiel has said so.

He wrote a long rant about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist. I think that places him more in the "insane" box than the "christian" one, but still.

The irony is killing me.

He misnomers a very special definition of antichrist that probably would include Greta (anyone who could encourage mass collectivism).

Which would make him hilariously unaware of the irony of the antichrist saying someone else is the antichrist.

"From nothing" is a fairly suspect claim, but your overall point is a good one

Rounded to the nearest $0.001B, I think it's correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com